Turning 30: On Your Thirtieth Birthday, You Suddenly Become An Old Person, Right? Wrong.

"How do you feel?" people kept asking as my thirtieth birthday approached this past April. Well, I felt pretty good: My hair was finally long enough to pull back into a real ponytail, my apartment had a washer-dryer, and I was learning to cook Italian (it's all about salting the pasta water). How was I supposed to feel?

Like crap, apparently. We're all too familiar with the thirtieth-birthday cliché: The semitragic single lady has a meltdown about how she's old and *she'llneverhavekidsandshe'sgoingtodiealone!*Kate Hudson put it this way in Something Borrowed: "You're 30—you can't afford to be picky." Lily Allen sings it thus: "She's nearly 30 now and…society says her life is already over." Google "I'm turning 30" and you'll meet a number of panicked bloggers—"I'm turning 30 soon. Any advice to cheer me up?"—and a few disturbing message boards like "What happens to women once they turn 30?" (According to commenter Emmortal, "Their vaginas fall out and are replaced by steel-tooth bear traps." Right back at ya, Emmortal!) I also found a cute site called omgimturning30.com, on which a 29-year-old beauty blogger and her cat try out various anti-aging creams. (Her last post was on January 7, though; I'm hoping she didn't turn 30 and, you know, lose the will to blog.) And a discussion on glamour.com yielded these nuggets: "I turned 30 last October and it sucked," wrote adams8424, adding, "You put these expectations on yourself that certain things will be done…and when they're not, you feel disappointed." Eulogized another: "Six months left in my twenties! It's terrifying and inevitable."

Hmm. Terrifying? It gets hard to tune out all that overblown negativity. So when I woke up on my birthday, I channeled Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles and studied myself in the mirror—though instead of looking for breasts, I was searching for wrinkles. I felt mildly depressed: I'd never be young again. My body would slowly break down and betray me. I'd lose touch with the zeitgeist and end up wearing skinny jeans years after they've gone "out." My boyfriend would dump me because now I had a steel-tooth bear trap down there. Annoyed at myself for caring, still in need of coffee, and for reasons more cinematic than I'd like to admit, I made a big, big mistake. I flipped my makeup mirror over…to the magnifying side. And there they were: two crow's-feet.

I know, cry me a river. Two measly crow's-feet. But they were my two measly crow's-feet. Despite my confidence, great job and cute ponytail, they were kind of freaking me out. And you know what? If I were a guy, I wouldn't have even noticed. A recent British survey found that women start feeling old at 29. Yet men don't consider themselves getting on in years until, well, they're actually getting on in years, at 58. That's annoying. Why do we feel old when we're in our physical prime, while men get to trot through life with nary a worry about aging in their balding heads?

When I asked Julie Tilsner, who wrote about the subject in her book 29 and Counting, that question, she told me, in so many words, to please relax. "Thirty is nothing to be afraid of," she says. "You've got a whole new decade to work with, and this time you're prepared! You're educated, you have years in the workplace, you finally know what your hair will and won't do. You can still dance on tables, but you have some life experience. Turning 30 is actually a really awesome thing." Fine, Julie, if you say so. But how are we supposed to just get over it? Here are the truths experts told me, and I'm telling you—whether the birthday spooking you is your thirtieth or any other.

30 Is Different for Everyone

When i was a kid, my daydreams about being 16 involved driving a pink convertible like Barbie's with a cute boyfriend riding shotgun. At actual 16, I had no boyfriend, had failed my driver's test—I still can't parallel park—but was happy playing soccer and hanging out with friends. There was no meltdown over not having the convertible; my life was fine. So why is it so hard to apply the same Zen attitude to 30?

Partly, it's our societal cult of youth. Post-30, it's hard to be special—I'll just be an adult doing adult-y things and can no longer qualify as a rising star or an up-and-comer. And I want to be an up-and-comer! "We're all supposed to be wunderkinds, have published novels by 25, be running GM by the time we're 30. And if not, we're failures. Which is ridiculous," says Tilsner. Should I have spent my twenties writing a book or a screenplay or getting myself on a "30 Under 30" list instead of watching Mean Girls a thousand times on TBS? Maybe. But I didn't, and I don't regret that. Because Mean Girls is a damn good movie, and I was working and dating and having fun instead. Cheers to Mark Zuckerberg, who made a billion by 23, and kudos to Lady Gaga, who at 25 has become a pop icon, but they're the exceptions to the rule. We're all on different time lines and need to realize that life isn't a race. It's more like one of those huge charity walkathons, where everyone's ambling along at her own pace, wearing a really dorky hat and lots of sunblock.

Anyway, We Should All Keep Acting 20

Before my little sister's wedding in May, I joked to an aunt that I was going to stay sober until my maid of honor speech and then rush to the bar for a few shots. She gave me a look. "Emma, you're 30. You're too old to take shots." Too old for shots! What else am I too old to do? In this culture, there are a lot of helpful people who'd like to tell me. Another recent British study surveyed 2,000 women about when you should stop wearing certain items of clothing. The answers were ridiculous: At 47, forget the bikini. At 40, you're too old to wear see-through shirts. At 51, off come the high heels (yeah, try telling Cher). Who makes these rules? People who are insecure. And I admit I've been there: While perusing Us Weekly, I've made age-related jabs at Gwyneth Paltrow. She's 38! Shouldn't her skirts be a little longer and her hair a little shorter? But if I look deep into my haterade (and I don't really want to, but for you, reader, I will), I realize that's it's probably just jealousy talking. Because, wow, does she have good legs! By what witchcraftery has she attained such perfect-looking legs?

Jealousy aside, our whole idea about what life is, and should be, before and after 30 is actually bonkers, argues Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. "Women in their twenties tend to have this get better' mind-set—they're looking at their lives in terms of making progress. It's like, Well, I'm only 25, I'm figuring things out. Then there's a shift at 30; we think we should already be perfect. Instead of thinking, I'm trying to get smarter, we have to prove we are smart." It's as if we think we're fully cooked and ready to come out of the oven, when in reality there are parts of us that may take decades to be fully realized.

Her advice: Live your whole life as if you're in your twenties. (It's unclear whether this includes doing shots.) "Women need to embrace that get better' mind-set in their thirties, forties and fifties," she counsels. "It's that keep-inching-forward mentality that will allow you to be happy with your choices."

My mom has a saying: You can always reinvent yourself. She went back to work at age 47 and now, at 60, has a thriving real estate business. Recently I had lunch with her and some of her friends and told them about this article. They laughed and laughed. "You have everything in front of you," my mom's friend Betsy told me. "And look at that skin!" she added wistfully. "Perfection." Oh.

30 Can Be Kind of Sad, but That's OK Too

TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK. What's that sound? It's your biological clock! And for many women, 30 is when it starts feeling real. True and embarrassing: Lately, I've found myself doing double takes on the street when I see cute babies. Because they're just so sweet! And small! *And I want one. * (Oops, did I just write that out loud?)

Maybe this is where that whole 29/58-woman/man split stems from. As women, we face some hard fertility facts, while men can have babies for as long as they can crawl into that Cialis bathtub. And, yes, it's easy to slide into the dreaded "If I meet him now, we can date for a year, then be engaged for a year, then get married and have a baby by 33…so I must meet him right now" rabbit hole. There's no easy fix for this feeling—if I had one, I definitely would be on a "30 Under 30" list. But it's a waste to get upset about something that's not totally within your control.

Truth is, turning 30 carries with it a certain sadness. Not everything is still available at the buffet table. Your fallback guy you figured you could always end up with? He might be married to someone else by now. Your dream of running off to live in Hawaii? If you have a baby at 30, it just may not happen. Damn it, you're even too old to be the next American Idol! It's OK to mourn a bit while also honoring the decisions you made to get where you are. Take it from Rebecca, 30, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco: "I thought that by 30, I'd be married with kids. I'm not, and so on my birthday I wondered, Have I failed at life? But I look at the stuff I've accomplished: I got my M.B.A., have an exciting job and have my own apartment. I feel much happier and confident in my thirties than I did in my twenties, and I imagine it only goes up from here."

Combat the 30 (or 25 or 40) Freak-out

So how can we adopt Rebecca's attitude when we're turning an age we're just not sure about? Some tricks I learned:

Remind yourself that Martha Stewart didn't start Martha-ing until she was 41. Or that at 30, Suze Orman was a waitress. See, you still have time to turn yourself into a brand!Watch out for the kind of lofty goals—"I'm going to meet the perfect man and get married this year!"—that can make anyone feel like a failure. My goal for 30: I'm going to improve my tennis serve. Because it stinks. And I can do something about that.Talk to your mom. Or grandma. Or any older lady. She'll be able to knock some sense into your still-very-young brain. She might also tell you to shut up; if so, listen.Go home and look at your baby pictures. You were cute! Think of how much you've changed and grown in the past 30 years and how much you'll change and grow in the next 30.

After a few months of being 30, I'm feeling pretty good about it. Though maybe not as good as actress Kristen Bell, who turned 30 last year and said, "I love 30 more than I've ever loved anything. I feel like I was born on my thirtieth birthday." OK, Kristen, hold up. I can't say I love 30 more than I've ever loved anything. I love french fries more than 30. I love watching True Blood more than 30. But I also love my washer-dryer and my career and my smarts and my sense of self-worth, all of which I'm able to have because I am 30. So enjoy your birthday, and screw em all—do a shot to celebrate.